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Professor, German and Russian Studies
Director of the Critical Theory concentration, focuses on philosophy, intellectual history, critical political economy, psychoanalysis, comparative literature, political theory, film theory, and biopolitics

A.Karina Kordela is Professor of German Studies and founding Director of the Critical Theory Program, at Macalester College, St. Paul, Minnesota, USA & Honorary Adjunct Professor with the School of Humanities and Languages, Writing and Society Research Group, University of Western Sydney, Australia. She received her Ph.D. at Cornell University in 1998.

Areas of Specialization:

Philosophy and intellectual history, with an emphasis on the formation of modernity; critical theory; Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis; German Baroque and Modernist literature; comparative literature and literary theory; political theory, theories of ideology and cultural analysis; visual and film theory; biopolitics. One distinguishing aspect of both her research and teaching is her focus on the relation between economic structures and metaphysics in secular capitalist modernity.

Professor Kordela teaches regularly courses in English toward both the German major/minor and the Critical Theory concentration, such as the core Critical Theory seminars "Dead White Men," and a series of different "Topics" seminars, such as "Metaphysics in Secular Thought," "German-French Dialogues in Critical Theory," Value" (a course on aesthetic theory, in its relation to economic and ethical values), ” "Modernity and the Unconscious," "Modernism-Postmodernism," "A Kafkaesque Century," “Philosophy, Literature, Film,” as well as courses on film theory - all of which also fulfill the critical theory German major requirement.

She has published numerous articles in academic journals, as well as the books Being, Time, Bios: Capitalism and Ontology (SUNY Press, 2013), Surplus: Spinoza, Lacan (SUNY Press, 2007), andthe co-edited collection of essays Freedom and Confinement in Modernity: Kafka’s Cages (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2011).